How to put a newline in ant property

Question

This doesn't seem to work:

<property name="foo" value="\n bar \n"/>

I use the property value in the body of an e-mail message (which is sent as plain text):

<mail ...>
  <message>some text${foo}</message>

and I get literal "\n" in the e-mail output.

Answer 1

These all work for me:

<property name="foo" value="bar${line.separator}bazz"/>

<property name="foo">bar
bazz2</property>

<property name="foo" value="bar&#10;bazz"/>

Answer 2

You want ${line.separator}. See this post for an example. Also, the Ant echo task manual page has an example using ${line.separator}.

By using ${line.separator} you're simply using a Java system property. You can read up on the list of system properties here, and here is Ant's manual page on Properties.